Singularity
by MarleneHH
Summary: An elderly professor of history discovers clues to a powerful energy known by mortals as magic. He and his niece are on the run from powerful people, who will stop at nothing to secure the energy source for themselves. They seek out the only person who can help them. The last person of magical origin. Together they must find the energies origin before their sinister enemies.
1. Chapter 1

This is the first time I upload a story, so I hope I did it right. I should also note, that I am not use to write in english, so I am open to critique regarding gramma ect. The story is inspired by a variety of thrillers, movies and science fiction novels, but since one of the main characters is largely inspired by the fairytale of Aladdin and the wonderful lamp (both the original from 1001 nights and Disney's version), I choose to place it here.  
Please comment and I will be grateful.

I hope you enjoy it, here it goes:

Chapter 1 – On the run

It had been such a strange day she felt a little dizzy. She leaned her head back and as the car drove through the outstretched woodlands, and summarized the bizarre day. It had begun with her normal morning run, but had soon spiraled into a strange and paranoid world. She enjoyed running in the early hours when the city had not yet woken up. It always put her in a calm meditative state of mind, but she couldn't quite get there this morning. Even though she loved the moist feeling of the rain and the sweet smell of leaf, wood and dirt, she had to stop. She leaned her hands on her knees and tried to slow her breathing. She couldn't let go of the spooky set of events which had plagued her uncle this last month. He was the only family she had and his problems laid heavy on her mind. Beside his other duties and studies as a professor of history and folklore at the university, he had worked on a personal project for the last decade. He kept his cards close to his body, and thus she didn't know much about the details of his research. She did know however that it concerned some sort of energy source described in rare and ancient texts. Lately he had discovered that powerful people wished to acquire his research with any means possible and his situation had got steadily more uncomfortable. When they spoke a few days ago he had been pale with dark rims around the eyes. Her mobile rang and yanked her out of her gloomy thoughts. It was her uncle and he sounded out of breath.

"Jessie! Pack your suitcase right away. We have to leave the country and fast. Don't ask questions, it's serious and i mean it. It's got to do with my work. I can't explain now, but please hurry!".

The naked fear in his voice scared the hell out of her and she sprang towards her home. Her uncle was not the type to panic and she trusted him. He had earned great respect among his colleagues both for his research, intelligences and his calm mind. So when he pulled his car up her driveway, she sprang to it with her suitcase packed. Her uncle wouldn't explain anything until they were on board their airplane and airborne. Then he finally told her about the project he had been working on "off duty" so to speak for the last decade. A good friend of his had sparked his interest and pointed him to the right sources. He had managed through years of hard work, to find rare texts describing a powerful source of energy. He wouldn't tell her anymore details about it other that it was extremely powerful and potentially dangerous. About a month ago he was contacted by a man who claimed to represent a group of wealthy beneficiaries looking to invest in historical research and artifacts. "In order to secure valuable knowledge and conduct important research projects under the best possible conditions." the guy had explained. It had all sounded a bit too good to be true in her uncles ears, especially since he had not published anything about it and the only other person who knew anything about it was his niece who studied theoretical physics at the university. So how did these people know? Apprehensive about the whole thing he politely declined the offer. Only days passed before he realized he was under surveillance and being followed. He wasn't completely sure however. Soon he began to loose fundings and support from the scientific community. His office at the university had been ransacked and that had convinced him to go to the authorities. But when he explained his problems he got the distinct feeling none of the police officers believed a word he said. He got the message that a report would be filed of course, but that resources was limited and they couldn't spare the manpower to conduct a thorough investigation. Early the following morning the representative he had met once before showed up in his home. This time he brought a gun. His study was ransacked and when the man didn't find anything, he pointed the gun to her uncles head. Certain about the gravity and potentially devastating effects his discoveries could have on the world he refused to utter a word to the man holding the gun. Realizing his hostage wouldn't bow down, the representative made it clear in no uncertain terms, that if the professor didn't deliver all his research by the next day his niece would suffer a cruel and violent end. With that threat hanging in the air he left the house. Now the professor finally began to panic. He could not trust the authorities or even his colleagues. He knew only one person he knew he could trust now. So he called his niece, told her to pack her bags, and a few hours later they boarded the airplane to Europe.

"So where are we going?" she had asked him.

He had paused for a moment looking at her. "To the only person I trust under these circumstances, love. You don't know him. It's been quite a few years since we last spoke, but trust me one last time. Not only is he wealthy and lives conveniently isolated, but he is the very person who first inspired my research on the energy source."

So here she was. On a remote mountain road surrounded by endless forest in a country she didn't even knew existed. She took a deep breath and rubbed her temples. She had a mild headache. "This guy must really hate people. Who lives so far away from civilization?" To underline her words they hit a large hole in the road and the rusty rental car creaked in agony.

"Don't judge him, love. He has good reason to want a little privacy and he's been through more than most people can imagine."

She felt a sting of guilty conscience. He laughed a little and smiled at her. "Don't feel bad. I know your tired and we're nearly there."

She looked out the window and yawned. This was turning out great. Followed by some crazy cult and now having to spend god knows how much time at some grumpy old professors house in the middle of nothing.

-o0o-

The djin was looking out the window, and though the sun was setting behind the mountains in a flash of red and orange, he didn't see any of it. His gaze was set on infinity as he was pondering the distant past. His long black hair hang loose and fell down over his broad shoulders and he held a glass of vodka. He was waring worn out jeans and a black sweatshirt. He didn't care much about his appearance these days, since he rarely had any company. It hadn't always been like that though. There was a time, centuries ago, when he had friends, good friends. He had started his life in servitude of whoever had claimed ownership of his prison, the lamp. But then he had got an unusually kindhearted master who had done the unthinkable. He had set him free. The following few decades he was ecstatic about his newly won freedom, and spent most of his time with his new friends. When they settled down and started a family of their own, things slowly but steadily began to change for him. He was of course happy on their behalf for having children and starting a family, but it left himself feeling a bit redundant or imposing. It also made him aware of a growing pain in his heart, though he kept it a well guarded secret. He felt lonely. He had friends and for that he was grateful, but he didn't have any family, and that made him feel alone on a very basic level. As with all humans, his former master grew old and finally died, which left an even bigger void inside him. He finished his drink and went to refill the glass. As he strolled back to the window his thoughts returned to the years after his friends had died. Decades came and went and he began to notice that his magical powers was disappearing. No doubt a process that began when he was granted his freedom. Magical powers always came at a price and he did in no way have any regrets about that, but he did worry anyway. His appearance settled into a fixed and much more "fleshed" form, but in no way human. He was still huge and blue and his facial features hadn't changed much. So he felt left with an appearance that set him greatly apart from everyone else, but with no magical powers. The thought of having a family of his own never seemed further away. As he sipped his drink he looked at his reflection in the window. Though he wasn't left wanting in muscle in any way, he just couldn't delude himself to think any woman would want to be with someone so large and alien. He looked away from his reflection with a sigh. He felt like getting himself drunk, but he was expecting an old friend tonight. Even so, he thought as he straightened his back, self pity wasn't a charming attribute and he refused to surrender to it. At that moment his sharp hearing caught the sound of a car driving up the road to the house.

-o0o-

The cold mountain wind sent shivers through her as she stepped out of the car. Before her was a large house, part wood and part stone. A few stone steps lead to the main entrance. It was a truly desolate place resting on the slopes of the mountains. But it definitely had a raw beauty about it. In the last remains of the disappearing sunlight she got a vague impression of a magnificent view over the valley they had been driving through. As her eyes returned to the house she saw the silhouette of a tall figure in the open door. For a moment a strange sensation ran through her. There was something about the shape she couldn't quite put her finger on. Something … different. They grabbed their sparse luggage and walked up the stairs. "Hi Steven" the man in the door said in a deep voice. "I thought you were coming alone." her uncle put his luggage down and shook the mans hand with both of his own. "Well, hello there to you too Djin. This is my niece Jessie and don't panic, she's properly house trained" he continued with a laugh. Djin took a step back clearing the doorway for them. As they entered a large hall he said in a milder tone: "Sorry, I didn't mean to sound rude, I was just surprised, that's all." She couldn't help but stair at the strange man looking down at her. She felt like a dwarf standing beside him, only reaching him to mid chest. His skin had a strange deep blue color and his face had a slightly unusual quality. High cheekbones, large eyes and strong jawline. His long black hair hang loose over his shoulders and broad chest. He stared at her with a piercing gaze that seemed to look directly into her inner most thoughts. She looked down feeling a bit embarrassed, fingered the buttons of her coat nervously and feelt terrible in the following awkward silence. When she looked back up he was smiling at her. His head slightly tilted and his arms crossed. There was an expression of amusement in his face. He glanced over at her uncle with one eyebrow raised then bowed slightly towards her and said: "Hi Jessie. I'm Djin. Come on in."

-o0o-


	2. Chapter 2

Here is the second chapter, in which the plot starts to evolve. I hope you'll review. I'm looking forward to some constructive critique, as this is my first story.

Enjoy:

Chapter 2 – Information, astonishment and curiosity

She had slept like a rock, got up late and eaten a sandwich in the kitchen. They had been exhausted the night before, so Djin had given them a quick tour of the house and then showed them to their rooms. Now she walked along a corridor when she heard voices behind a door. She opened and looked inside. It was a large room with a long table in the middle and high ceilings. Along one wall the sunlight was pouring through a series of windows. All around the rest of the room there were bookcases and various cabinets with heaps of artifacts, scrolls, books, stacks of papers, boxes and various trinkets and nick nacks in large disorganized piles. Her father was sitting at the table working at his computer and Djin was leaning against the table where a collection of books, photos and documents were spread out. He looked up when she entered. "Good morning sleepyhead" he said with wry smile. Her uncle looked up from his computer and said: "Ah, Jessie! Good to finally see you up. Come over here, love. I'll bring you up to speed on things." She walked over to him and pulled up a chair as Djin poured her a cup of coffee.

"Now, this energy source I was telling you about" her uncle began, "I first heard about it from our friend Djin here. He recommended I contacted an Egyptian family he knew to posses some interesting texts about it. I'd have to tell them that Djin vouched for my integrity or they would of course deny any knowledge of such texts. When I examined them I was not only reassured of their authenticity, but also that this subject was worth investigating further. The remarkable thing about the texts was that they reflected an exceptional insight in quantum physics, far ahead of their time. Right up your alley, love." He said looking at her with raised eyebrows.

"Wow" I said. Not being able to describe my surprise in any other way. "Could I see these texts?"

"Thats not possible I'm afraid. I was extremely lucky to have been aloud to examine them in the first place. In fact the guy who showed them to me got in a great deal of trouble with the rest of his family for my sake. I did take a lot of notes and you can see them right here." He opened a file on the computer and placed it in front of her. She began to read through her uncles notes.

"Did a text from 2.000 b.c. really document this?" she gasped. "This describes the basic forces of quantum physics and how they are carried. Electromagnetism, the strong and weak force and even gravity. We didn't really understand these things before we had the large Hadron Collider that can split atomic particles. This can't be true. How would they know?" She looked from her uncle to Djin.

"Read further" her uncle said mildly.

She returned to the computer and learned that the ancient texts had described an energy she'd never heard about. The notes got a little vague on the subject and she was about to ask her uncle about that, but he'd already seen where she was in his notes.

"Yes, i know" he said with regret "I was a bit in over my head there and it was really difficult to make sense of it, but this is as close and precise as I was able to make notes."

She sighed a little, wishing she could have been there with him when he made these notes. Perhaps she would have understood it deeper. The energy, the texts had described, was believed to bind together force and particle, the Higgs particle with matter. Thus it was the one thing which made existence possible. This was the end of the notes and she leaned back in the chair just starring at the computer screen. This was unbelievable. The elusive Higgs particle was only just recently discovered after years of searching at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. An underground particle accelerator so powerful and large it crossed three countries.

"If you have room in your head, theres more" her uncle said and opened another file. I researched for some years when I found out, that the original texts was written by a certain group of scholars. I spent a long time tracking their lineage, and it was quite a headache I can tell you. Their tracks mostly just disappeared, but one of them I tracked down to India. I started going through any and all things that might prove relevant from the area I had narrowed the search to. I was about to give up, and I were in fact sitting at the airport waiting to board a plane home, when I had a revelation. I was looking at a poster with one of these 3D holograms you can only see if you look at it the right way. You know them, right?"

She nodded. Yes, she knew them. She could never see anything in the damn things, all she got was a headache.

"You have to see right through them, you know, focus on something beyond the surface of the paper. Then you realize the image was right there all the time" Her uncle said and winked at her. "I had assumed I was looking for something never seen before. It had never occurred to me, that the clues could be right in front of me. I just had to look at it the right way."

Djin sat down on the table next to the computer and looked down at her. "Your uncle is a brilliant man, Jessie. I have wondered about this stuff for..." he said, but paused for a moment. Then continued "well, ...for a long time, and what Steven had realized, never even occurred to me. Not even close."

He was inches away from her and his closeness sent a rush of heat to her cheeks. She felt a bit embarrassed. After all she wasn't a teenager and she had only just met the guy, not to mention his odd appearance. He was kind of cute though, and she surprised herself when she nearly broke into a girly giggle.

"I felt a little stupid when I realized." her uncle said. "This was very important knowledge. Knowledge is power as you know and it can be dangerous. Especially if it's far ahead of your time. These scholars and their descendants would most likely conceal their knowledge for the uninitiated eyes. Probably in code or a symbolic language only they understood. I had to look again, and this time for any possible symbolic or coded language that could fit with basic quantum physics."

She held a hand against her forehead. "Call me narrow minded, but this is all a bit too much for me. Perhaps I'm just not smart enough."

Djin put a hand on her shoulder and looked her straight into the eyes. "Don't say that".

"Right" her uncle said, "had it not been for you, your excellent insight in physics and your skill for explaining it to me and others so we understand it, I would never had understood what I has looking at, when I read the Egyptian texts."

She looked gratefully at both of them. In part grateful to Djin for touching her shoulder. "Teenager!", she thought scolding herself.

"I'm going to show you a series of photos of various buildings and works of art" her uncle continued as he picked out photos and documents from the piles on the table. He laid them in front of her. "This is what I found interesting." He pointed out a number of symbols and detailed adornments on Indian ruins and explained how they were connected.

"You see love, if you put your "quantum eyeglasses" on and compare with the original Egyptian texts, it makes sense"

She couldn't see it and concentrated harder. Then it struck her. It was maps. She had assumed the carvings and illustrations was letters or basic pictures, but it was illustrations of subatomic particle relations. She gasped. "My god! Why didn't anyone see this before?"

Her uncle said: "Because they weren't looking the right way. Like with the holograms."

Djin added: "How many people acquainted with advanced physics would study these ruins with the specific purpose of finding illustrations of these quantum, uh... the relations of..." He sighed, "well there you see. It's all gobbledygook to me, but then i'm not a physicist."

Her uncle continued: "Look at this." He pointed at an aerial photo of a collection of ruins surrounded by jungle. On top of the photo the outlines of the buildings and roads were highlighted with an red pen. The other photos you've been looking at are all taken at different places in these ruins. Look at the square at the far east of the city."

She looked and saw a square shaped like a semicircle.

"In the middle of this square is a large block of stone with a symbol of a rising sun. Beneath it you can see this line of symbols." He showed her another photo. "These are numbers. It has long been assumed that they are dates of whatever calendar the original inhabitants used, but think maps love. You have the large sun pointed east, a star carved into the floor underneath and then numbers."

He paused and looked at her. She was confused. Then it struck her and she smiled. "Of course! It's coordinates."

Her uncle looked impressed and said with astonishment: "Very, very close. It's a scale."

"Scale?" Now she was confused again.

"See, the whole city is a map, and this is the scale you need to read it with. Now you only need one thing to put it to use."

Djin said: "A "You are here" dot!" with a deep laugh."And given that the original builders plastered an encyclopedia quantum mechanica all over the place, we can be sure that whatever this map points to, it's probably something very cool."

-o0o-

He could see she tried to cope with the large amount of information her uncle Steven had explained to her. She seemed smart though. Quite brilliant in fact, so he was confident she would quickly absorb it all.

Steven looked at his niece and said: "This is where I got stuck however. I couldn't seem to crack the code to any fixed point on the map. I just don't have enough information. But he might have." He said pointing at Djin. Jessie looked up at Djin with large eyes full of surprise. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. Mostly to conceal that her eyes mesmerized him. "Well, uh..." he started. "I have quite a collection of books and stuff. Some of it rather rare". She pushed the chair back a little and took a long look at him squinting her eyes. "Boy, she's sharp", he thought. "There's no fooling her". He couldn't help but smile a little. She had delicate features, a small pointed nose and clear blue eyes that radiated with intelligences. Her blond hair had a glow of red and looked soft. "Hold it right there or you'll get hurt you fool!" he thought to himself.

"And where exactly do you fit in to all of this?" She said snapping him out of his line of thoughts.

He fingered the collar of his shirt. "What do you mean?" He said cautiously and hopeful.

She said: "I don't mean to sound rude, ungrateful or imposing here, but I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me. Perhaps the both of you." She glanced at her uncle. "You have a large collection of rare and valuable books and artifacts here. You know about Egyptian texts which apparently no one knows about, and furthermore, the owners of these texts are willing to let a stranger see them, with only your word vouching for him. And..." She paused looking rather uncomfortable.

"Just speak your mind" he said mildly, "I won't be offended".

She continued: "You look...so different. Who are you really?"

Silence. For a long moment.

He sighed. A sigh full of anxiety, hope and surrender.

"It's going to take a while to answer".

-o0o-


End file.
